Walt Whitman: I Hear America Singing
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown…
Baron Wormser: What Nurtures Us, What Diminishes Us
Poetry is the remembrance and avowal of loss and is accordingly pushed aside.
Barbara Crooker: Who Do You Carry?
On city streets, the homeless unfurl
their sleeping bags like hungry tongues.
Allen Ginsberg: A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
Baron Wormser: Vistas
I don’t doubt that somewhere in the United States some class or reading group, as a way of girding their collective loins for the upcoming election, is reading or rereading Democratic Vistas, an 1871 essay in which Walt Whitman surveyed American democracy’s prospects.
Video: Walt Whitman — “Song of Myself”
Produced by Harvard University, this series of animations looks to poetry to explain what science renders dry and academic.
Michael Simms: Rhythm Benders | The Musicality of American Poetry
A poem is rooted in the rhythms of pulse, breath and movement.
John Burroughs: Waiting
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind nor tide nor sea;
I rave no more ‘gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.
Walt Whitman: On the Beach at Night
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
Ira Chernus: Who Will Speak Up for My Child, the Drag Queen?
How we treat the most marginal and vulnerable among us determines the quality of life for the rest of us…. A good society takes care of the most vulnerable by assuring their safety…
Walt Whitman: Come Up from the Fields Father
Open the envelope quickly,
O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!
Paul Christensen: The Snow It Snoweth Every Day
I’m not complaining too loudly. The Ukrainians are out there on the hills waiting to get into Poland, and the snow is pelting their thin coats and caps and making the kids squirm up against their moms.
Henry David Thoreau: On Eating Animals
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilised.
Walt Whitman: When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
